Sure, being a
member of the New York City insightful-social-commentary-producing elite can
seem glamorous. You get to go to parties related to having a job at Vanity
Fair and use words like “ersatz.” But your love life is likely to be of the
tragicomic variety and, despite all yearnings to the contrary, you must be
ever vigilant against happiness as it dulls your edge. And while it must be
lovely to live in a world where obsessive introspection, schadenfreude and
sarcasm-filled depression are socially acceptable, it must also be—on
occasion—dreadfully boring.

Peter Hyman knows
this.

An author of the
“first-person-journalism” kind (a literary style also known as “humorous
essays” or “self-absorbed letters to your parents”), Hyman has written a book,
The Reluctant Metrosexual, entirely about him and, for the most part, his
failures. At love, at career, at coolness.

Think about the
improbability of this for a moment. You and I fail too, but nobody’s giving us
a book deal. (Though, if one were offered…)

Hyman, therefore,
realizes that his failures, related in sarcasm-filled, urbane-anecdote-stuffed
stories, must be special. They must stick out from the failure-related stories
you and I tell about our own lives. They must be funnier and more city-cool
than the other books by urbane twenty- and thirty-somethings with funny, cool
stories of failure. They must transcend that style of wit that is both
humorously judgmental and mock-unknowingly self-effacing. They must be
objectively introspective. Detachedly involved. Meta-funny.

This can be a
difficult pose to hold for very long, requiring as it does so many twists and
turns of whose joke is on whom. And that in itself can be funny, because
nearly nobody can really hold their nose in the air while letting their
glasses geekily slide down it. Hyman recognizes this. After all, he offers
this criticism of the book in his introduction: “This book is a pompous
exercise in self-aggrandizement that tries too hard to be funny and displays
the author’s under-nourished but delusional sense of his own importance.”

We get here, like
in all books of this ilk, a collection of sexual and romantic embarrassment
stories (he makes an abortive attempt at a threesome; his stabs at Internet
dating all end with the women running to the bathroom to vomit), career
failures and mishaps and his general life malaise. As with comedians and
stories about air travel—complete with accompanying commentary on the little
bags of peanuts—this subject matter is pretty standard for your first-person
humorous essays collection. And yet—as any trip to a comedy club will teach
you—even familiar subject matter can feel fresh and funny with the right
delivery.

Hyman’s delivery
is mostly on target. While the woe-is-me, no, excuse me, woe-unto-I can get a
bit heavy when taken in one sitting—I would strongly recommend against trying
to read this book straight through—the tart little commentaries act as a
refreshing sorbet when digested in smaller scoops.

And, in between
reading heavier fare, this kind of hipster snark can serve as the perfect
palate-cleanser.